Some of my OSCON photos are up on Flickr. I have more, but I've run into my limit for the month...and its only the 1st of August!!!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/52302911@N00/sets/72157594216912528/ 

This talk was by Jeff Waugh who works on the Ubuntu team and has experience with the GNOME team in Australia.

How the Ubuntu community came about? The Ubuntu project is the brainchild of Mark Shuttleworth, who wanted to build a Linux distro that was clean, simple and easy to use. Interestingly, before building a distro, he went about building a community. A community with shared values and shared vision. His group, which largely intersects with employees of Canonical, Ltd. got together and brainstormed about the concept of what people need and how it can be done. Ubuntu has a Code of conduct which is explicitly spelled out. This lays a foundation for a common ground to work from. Next is the Ubuntu commitment - explicitly spelled out a well, and typically found printed on their free CD covers. Some of those points are:

Last night, Asa Dotzler from Mozilla Firefox presented a collection of the top few movies (flicks) made by people in the Mozilla Firefox community to promote Firefox. They also presented  "behind the scenes" videos of work on the flicks at Mozilla's offices in Mountain View, CA

Check out http://www.firefoxflicks.com/

This was a session from last night on the state of software. The updates were done in 5 minutes, hence the term "lightning".

Here are my notes:

State of:

Project GlassFish 

• Java EE 5 (note jump in versioning of J2EE).
• http://blogs.sun.com/theAquarium
• http://java.sun.com/javaee/theAquarium

GNOME

• Very poorly presented. Some updates on the GNOME conference in Spain. A tiny mention of Summer of Code projects from Google and the fact that no women applied.

I am at O'Reilly's Open Source Conference which is being held in Portland, Oregon. The event is teeming with geeks and coders from all over the place. The energy level is quite high. The one thing I don't get is - why are so many of these "purveyors of open source software" using closed source software? Practice what you preach! Use open source software!!!

No, I am not talking about Windows XP. I am talking about Mac users. Isn't the Mac OSX closed source? So why have a soft corner for a closed source OS? Is the enemy of your enemy, your friend or are you just not willing to "do it yourself"? I wonder...

My notes on this presentation (OSCON 2006) are based on Lars Thalmann's experience with MySQL cluster that was developed at Ericsson R&D and was later purchased by MySQL as open source software.

Ericsson Business Relations (a unit within Ericsson) managed this project in its early days. Focus was on availability (5 nines) and long sales/deployment cycles. The development model was traditional and closed source. Only customers saw the software - no free downloads. Ericsson had its own internal API and a SQL layer and ODBC layer to be accessible to the outside. Then things changed. Ericsson started to cut down on its assets. Ericsson lost interest in this clustering technology as it wasn't really Ericsson's core competency. On the other hand, MySQL needed a solution in the cluster database space, so the sale came about.